The Collection (2012)
The Collection is a 2012 American action horror-thriller film, a sequel to the 2009 film, The Collector. The film stars Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, and Josh Stewart, who reprises his role from the first film as Arkin. It is written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, and directed by Dunstan. The film opens with a series of television broadcasts that make clear The Collector is a brutal serial killer and is still at large, after the disappearances of more than fifty people. He is now the focus of a massive police manhunt. Arkin, returning from the first film, is the most recent known victim. Teenager Elena Peters is taken by her friends, Missy and Josh, to a secret party at an undisclosed location. Elena witnesses her boyfriend, Brian, who bailed out on their date the same night, with another woman. She gets upset, punches him in the face, and leaves the crowded dance floor to enter an isolated room. There, she discovers a red trunk and opens it to find a severely injured Arkin. Arkin grabs Elena and they both dodge a steel spear that shoots from the wall which initiates a series of deadly traps. First, a large combine, similar to a wheat thresher, tears through the dance floor, shredding hundreds of people. Meanwhile, a frightened girl steps on a trip wire, initiating thin swords to fling out of a hallway, hitting people in the chest and neck. Finally, a small room locks shut with two steel bar barriers, and the Collector is spotted standing on a crate panel shaft in the ceiling. The ceiling lowers completely on the last victims, including Missy, slowly crushing them to death as Elena watches them in horror. The Collector quickly finds and captures Elena, while Arkin escapes by taking a man's body as a protective shield and jumping out of a high window, landing on a car and breaking his arm in the process. At the hospital, Arkin is arrested by the police and put under constant surveillance due to his known criminal record. After suffering nightmares of his torture from the Collector, he is approached by Lucello, the right-hand man of Elena's wealthy father. Lucello has hired a team of mercenaries to hunt the Collector down and save Elena before she is killed. Lucello implies that if Arkin leads them to the Collector's hideout, he will save Arkin from his criminal record. Since he was previously kidnapped by the Collector, Arkin had marked the turns in their journey on his arm with a series of cuts. He is able to lead the mercenary group to the Collector's base, the abandoned Hotel Sargento, in the empty and desolate part of town. Meanwhile, Elena uses her bra to push through a hole in the red trunk, and watches in horror as a man, chained to a gurney, is injected, tongue cut off and a half-face mask stapled to his head. When the Collector leaves, Elena manages to grip the latch and escape from inside. Upon their arrival, Arkin refuses to go inside, and Lucello then double-crosses him and forces him at gunpoint to guide them through the hotel. The Collector re-enters the room and notices her escape, so he lets loose several tarantulas, hoping this will reveal her hidden location. However, Elena is able to escape while the Collector is distracted by the surveillance alarms triggered by the team of mercenaries. Upon entering the hotel, the team is attacked by various wild people who the Collector had captured and driven insane with drugs (including the man that Elena had seen chained earlier), forcing the team to shoot them. Arkin takes the opportunity to escape from Lucello. At this point, the film jumps among three groups: Elena trying to find an exit, Arkin trying to escape, and the mercenary team led by Lucello trying to find Elena. While wandering the hotel, all three encounter live humans being experimented upon and human body parts re-arranged to resemble insects; the newly made bodies are displayed in glass cases. Arkin narrowly escapes the Collector in a room with a blinking light but is unable to find an exit. Members of the mercenary team are killed or captured one by one. Elena finds a room full of make-up and a prisoner named Abby who claims to be the Collector's "favorite" and is reluctant to break his rules. When Abby notices Elena adjusting her hearing aid she panics, claiming that Elena isn't strong enough for the collection and that she wasn't supposed to escape. Elena and Abby are separated when the Collector finds them. Eventually, Lucello and his surviving team captures Arkin in a room, but the Collector appears, takes Paz and tortures her with a razor. Later, Elena and Lucello reunite and rescue Paz from a trap, all other members of the team having been killed; they also find Abby, who asks to escape with them. The group finds a room with a small window that they cannot escape through, but they see two homeless men outside. When the men are unable to hear their shouts, Arkin shoots one of them. He fires a second shot when police arrive, causing the SWAT team to surround the building. The Collector notices this through his security system and runs off with an assault rifle. However, Abby is caught betraying the group's location to the Collector, but dies when she steps on a board of nails and falls back into an iron maiden-like trap, which mechanically folds with her inside. Enraged by this, the Collector attacks the group with a pair of aggressive attack dogs and kidnaps Elena. Lucello, pinned to the ground with another iron maiden trap approaching from above, tells the group to save Elena and leave him. They find her strapped to an autopsy table with duct tape, but when they approach, they are trapped in a cage that falls from above. The Collector appears and makes it apparent by displaying and flashing a lighter that he is going to burn down the building, but Arkin manages to open the cage by having Elena re-break his arm so that he can reach the latch. The group escapes through a dumbwaiter and finds an exit door to the building, however, is jammed from the outside. The Collector appears again, kills Paz, and easily beats Arkin in a fist fight since the latter has only one functional arm. As the Collector is about to kill Arkin, Lucello appears, having survived his trap by using one of the dog corpses. He fights the Collector in a knife fight but loses; however, as a final act, he holds the Collector in place so that Arkin can get the upper hand, Arkin savagely beats the Collector before throwing his body down a chute onto a pile of disfigured body parts covered in gasoline and lighting it on fire. As the building burns down, the fire department hears Elena's screams and opens the door from the outside, allowing Elena and Arkin, the last survivors, to escape. As the two sit outside an ambulance, Arkin notices a pile of trunks, and, upon searching inside them, finds the Collector's burned mask inside Arkin's trunk, with no corpse. Some time later, Arkin manages to track down the Collector's house by searching for every registered entomologist nearby. Arkin confronts the Collector when he comes home and says he will torture the Collector as he tortured Arkin. The Collector attacks Arkin with a switchblade, but is forced into his red box and desperately clings onto the sides as Arkin slams the box shut.